3 Mins
In this article, we explore what a week in the life of an Audit Manager is like at Henderson Loggie.
Darren Watson joined HL on a training contract in 2014 and qualified as a Chartered Accountant in late 2017, before progressing to Manager level with the firm in 2021.
From team meetings to client interactions and community engagement, this look into Darren’s routine sheds light on the diverse experiences that shape his role.
Like what you see? Explore our open positions in Audit.
Monday – Our weekly managers’ meeting
With the bulk of our audit team spread across our two main offices in Dundee and Edinburgh, the audit managers catch up every Monday morning with our Resource Planner to make sure the team are kept busy and that we have plans in place to meet our client deadlines. This also gives us all a chance to catch up with one another, which is great given we have a mix of part-time and full-time managers making use of our flexible working policy. We then cover any additional points such as ensuring we have sufficient manager coverage in the offices, arranging catch-up time for the team to minimise backlogs, and discussing any technical updates and proposed changes to our audit methodology.
The rest of the day involves reviewing the audit work performed by the team on my client assignments to ensure they are ready for partner review, dealing with software queries as one of the firm’s IT specialists, and supporting the team with any problems they encounter during their day-to-day work.
Tuesday – Our department strategy session and firm badminton
As we approach our firm’s year end, the audit partners ran a session on our department strategy going forward and introduced us to some of the proposed key performance indicators we may be interested in when measuring its success. This gave the full management team an opportunity to feed into this process ensuring we have a voice in the strategy and allowed us a chance to identify the performance indicators that we felt were most important. I find these sessions to be one of the best parts of working at a firm like Henderson Loggie where everyone’s opinion matters and everyone can bring their ideas forward knowing they will be listened to.
Every week we also have a Dundee badminton club where we have members of the team from across departments coming together to play and socialise. I’ve found this a really good way to meet people you don’t get the chance to work with on a day-to-day basis, as well as a way to wind down and keep active.
Wednesday – Client meetings and office work
On Wednesday I spent the morning out at a client planning meeting with the audit partner and tax team. Client planning meetings are a vital part of our audit process as well as an opportunity for us to get together with our clients and find out how things are going with their business. At this particular client, we ran through our plans for the upcoming audit, got some insights into how things have been going, and identified some of the key risks that we would be focussing on. Moreover, we got our tour around their site and a look at the different offerings they can bring to their client base which was a testament to the hard work they have been putting in.
That afternoon I met with one of the tax managers to update them on timelines for work coming across from the audit department and reviewed some of our audit planning work ahead of an audit starting the following week.
Thursday – TikToks and office work
One of our key focuses as a department is making the audit profession accessible and to promote the career to those at School, College, and University. Our marketing team have been doing a brilliant job engaging with those considering a job in audit through TikTok, LinkedIn and our website. On Thursdays, I take part in the filming of our weekly TikToks with our marketing team and it’s a fun way of putting across the different personalities and interests in the firm and reaching out to a wider audience.
Friday – University of Dundee tutorials
On Friday I helped run the last of six tutorials at the University of Dundee to their third-year Accountancy students taking the Audit Module. This was a collaboration with the lecturers of the module and was a way to give an insight into how the lecture material flows into the day-to-day job and inspire some new faces to look into audit as a potential career path when they graduate. This along with the prep work also helped build some internal resources we could use as a department to run training sessions to our trainees.
Join our Audit team
Are you ready to take your audit career to the next level? Join our growing team at Henderson Loggie and embark on a journey filled with great people and exciting opportunities!